Sublime

For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.

In Adler’s view, “It is only when a person is able to feel that he has worth that he can possess courage.”

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be jus

Søren Kierkegaard spoke of the “despair of wanting to be another self”; we all know that despair.1 At times of such despair, knowing what it is that moves us the most can be a critical touchstone.

Powerful emotions, therapy says, are triggered in the present by traumas and difficulties that began in a distant and usually largely forgotten past.

The neo-Freudians, the ego psychologists, deal mainly with the deficiency of Value and self-esteem, the deficiencies of the various flavors of Love that come from object relationships, and the deficiency that results from the absence of the Personal Essence, which is true individuality.

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.

For example, Dale Carnegie, who wrote the international bestsellers How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, referred to Adler as “a great psychologist who devoted his life to researching humans and their latent abilities.”